First thing I would suggest is to check all your connections, inside and out. Especially the drive connectors. During cleaning, if you were moving any wires around it is pretty easy to slightly dislodge the cables.

After that if no improvement, I would probably boot to a live CD (PartedMagic included w/ UBCD) or such and try to copy any important files to a flash drive or secondary hard drive or partition.

Then I would run "chkdsk c: /f" from a command prompt.

If none of that helps, I would then run the manufacturer's diagnostic/repair such as Western Digitals DLG.

DFT (Drive Fitness Test) 4.16 is included in the latest UBCD but not sure which version is on the UBCD ISO you downloaded (UBCD4?) but it should be there AFAIK. I would run DFT and try that before using anything else.

DFT is on the UBCD 4.11, after googleing UBCD 4.11, which is the version I have, I found that the DFT on this version is 4.09.

Be advised that is what I ran to get the results in my first post.

Are suggesting that I download,burn and run the latest UBCD version and DFT ?

I do usually run the latest that I have but have used older versions as well. I've had times when a newer version wouldn't see the drives, especially when connected via USB so I go with what works. If a newer version has bug fixes it only makes sense to use it over a previous version.

If you do download the newest UBCD - 5.2.9, I would boot to PMagic first to see if I could get anything off before doing anything else that could further corrupt data. If nothing important is on the drive, I'd skip that and just re-partition, re-format and re-install/restore OS.

Thank you for your patience PINEY. I going to try using UBCD 5.2.9 since I don't see a version of PMagic on my version of UBCD. Try and save any important data I can find off the drive and repartition, reformat, and reinstall Vista.

There's just one problem. Can I repartition and reformat the drive using UBCD alone?

And all I have to try to reinstall/restore the operating system is a recovery dvd that the system prompted me to create when I first turned on the computer.

I do not have an operating system cd/dvd.

Just so you know I already tried the recovery dvd to restore the operating system from it's current state with no luck.

You can use GParted which is included in PMagic to re-partition the drive. There are several formatting utilities in UBCD but I usually use the OS I'm installing to do that.

The recovery DVD will format and possibly partition the drive. If your system had a recovery partition it should re-create that partition and restore the system partition/drive to factory settings. If your having problems with the recovery DVD you may have to get another from the manufacturer or replace with a retail version. You can often find ISOs of recovery DVDs available on the net, some legal downloads and other not so much.

You can try to recover the partition, testdisk is included in PMagic... If your able to recover the partition you should be good, but I would still copy everything over to another drive and reload/restore.

See if you can access the recovery partition when booting, I found forum posts showing F8 and F11. The timing can be a bit of a pain with some systems and when to hit the button. I usually keep hitting the key every couple seconds, mainly as the cursor starts flashing in the upper left corner on some.

If you can't get that to work I would just replace the drive and try the restore CD/DVD again.

Hello Piney. Guess what, using Kingwins EZ-CONNECT USB 2.0 to SATA & IDE Adapter for 2.5" & 3.5" Hard Drives, I was able to hook the supposed failed hard drive to my other desktop computer and now I have access to all the files on that drive.

Still plan to replace that drive. Is there a way to copy this entire (failed drive) to a newer drive, put the newer drive in the computer and make it work as before?

UBCD has several "Cloning" programs, you can find them in the menu under HDD/Disk Cloning. I've used EaseUs Disk Copy and others with little to no problems. The hard drive manufacturer's boot CDs usually have something for this such as Western Digitals DLG having Acronis True Image which is excellent.

If the recovery partition from the old drive is still good, you may even be able to restore from that again after cloning the drive.

Note: If there are corrupt or worse, bad sectors on the drive the data may still be lost but hopefully you can get what you need off of the drive. It's nice to hear that you are able to access the drive that way.

Hey Piney, my computer is back up due to Acronis True Image. I was able to clone the Recovery Partition only, to a new hard drive of the same size as the original 160GB. I put the new drive in the computer hooked up the monitor, keyboard, started it up and it booted to the recovery partition. On the System Recovery Option screen I had two choices, 1. Choose Operating System. 2. Load Drivers.

I clicked Load Drivers since there were no Operating Systems showing.

The Add Drivers window came up next asked for Installation Media for the device.

Since I didn't have a Vista disc, I put the Recovery Disc in the DVD-+RW drive clicked ok and the window that came up next showed all the drivers on the Recovery Disc but I didn't know what drivers to click on. So I clicked back and clicked Cancel and that's what got the ball rolling because the computer took over from there loaded every thing it needed and in about an hour it was was loading the Vista Operating System as before.

Just wanted to let you know that time was well spent. Thank very much again for all help.

When I get the chance I am going to sent you a donation to help with UBCD Project.

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